This time, I’d specifically like to talk about Personal Branding. As I always do, here is the first part of the definition from Wikipedia: “Personal Branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. While previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal-branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging.”.

This morning (very early I’d say) I was listening to one of my favorite social media book which is “Unmarketing” by Scott Stratten.

Well, not exactly reading per se, I was listening to it while driving. I think the audible.com books is a great way to listen to your books while doing something else, thus optimizing your time.

There are a lot of concepts that I like most about the book but I don’t want to do a book review but instead I want to grab some of these concepts and put them into action.

If you read some social media books, you’ll realize many things discussed are very similar: there are definitions, strategies, tips, most of the things are similar. At least the deliverables are very similar.

In my case, I’m more interested in Personal Branding. I think it’s one of the most important activity you can do to increase your reputation, impact and influence across all the major social media. And be aware, your reputation will easily go from the online space to the offline. The point is: how do I use the social media tools to make this happen?

I already mentioned this in my previous post: it’s not about to be or not to be, it’s about the HOW.

Having said that one of the most important, the key, to start increasing your Brand Reputation is to “get engaged”.

Let me do a step back though.

You want to get engaged because? Because maybe you’re passionate about something. Or maybe you like help people learn what you know. Or maybe you want to learn from them and then re-define your actions, whether these are online of offline, based on what you learnt. But, in the end, it’s about getting engaged. It’s the first rule of being part of this “Social Media Revolution”, the same revolution that allowed us to move from the Web 1.0 to the Web 2.0.

So getting engaged is the first part. Then you need to define your HOW.

How do I want to do it? Do you I have a plan for that? Maybe not, not now, not at the beginning of your journey. I think, first of all, you need to understand YOU as a Brand. How do you position yourself as a Brand? How do others perceive you? What’s my reputation among my peers/followers/readers/friends/colleagues etc. ?

When you realize that, you start acting. One exercise I would suggest you would be to go back to your older tweets and blog posts and facebook posts and LinkedIn posts and see what you said. Remember: in the Social Media environment, YOU are the CONTENT You provide. So you realize is, say, 40% IT related stuff, 30% retweets, 20% Pictures (which pictures? What about them?) and 10% funny videos%.

When you do this exercise you might probably want to fine tuning the content you are providing in order to increase your Brand in the, say, IT Environment.

That is what I call “look-back”.

The second, and very important part of it (we already talked about it) is to start engaging with your audience.

Whether you are a sales accountant, a novelist, a professional snowboarder, a marketing manager, an event planner, you HAVE TO get engaged in order to build your Personal Brand.

In the following posts we will dig into it: let’s just call this a Level 100 starter kit

I joined Twitter on April-May 2007 (I don’t remember exactly), when people thought that Twitter was just a mere “what am I doing” tool. Then I kept my account but I decided to use Jaiku which had, on that time, geo-location already. Jaiku “lost” the micro-blogging battle (and Google was not that happy about that as it bought Jaiku..).

Then Twitter changed, and people realized how powerful this tool can be. But I don’t want to talk about that in details (maybe in another post) but I want to focus on an issue that is still present.

On that time I used the nick Alead (with A capital letter). After starting to re-use it, I decided to change the name (you can easily do so by going to “Settings –> Profile –> Username), in line with the trends, to alead.

I realized, year over year, that sometimes I couldn’t see my tweets’ re-tweets made by other users.

The reason? some client don’t support the new re-tweet feature. Or, I should say, they have that feature but for some reasons they see my username as 2 different ones. So basically, if you re-tweet in the old style using a phone client, everything is fine (and if you use TweetDeck or Metro Twit you can see them in the Mentions column). But If you re-tweet in the new way, chances are you won’t be able to see them (it doesn’t happen all the time, it seems to be random).

Hootsuite and Rowi, for example, do not allow you to see the re-tweets made in this way. And there are probably other twitter clients that don’t allow to do that.

So this is just to make you aware of this, and maybe push the developers to implement it better…

One last tip: if you are new to twitter, be sure to choose a very “simple and short” username: remember there are only 140 characters available and you need to let others add their own comments…

I had some time this early morning and I wanted to do some (rookie) SEO on my blog.

Basically, when I search for my name, it always appears my old blog. Even if I search my name+blog it doesn’t work. Although the search gives me a lot of links regarding my “online life”, there was no way to appear in in searching for my full name. And this happens with Bing, Google and Yahoo search engines.

You can also use the “verify external services” feature: using your other accounts (LinkedIn, Facebook and others) to confirm that you’re really what you claim to be.

There’s another little open question to me. I saw that, depending on where you are, you got different search results. This is because some services use the location based feature so, no matter if you’re writing in English, chances are that you’ll not appear in your searches when you are in a foreign Country. Do you have any ideas on how this works ?